I figured out I didn’t post anything here for quite a while – actually more than two months! There have been a series of events that have stopped me from updating this blog and, for a good part of these two months, have stopped me from doing anything besides checking my email and doing some school work.

The first cause for my online absence was that, a few days after I posted about this server having been reloaded, school classes have started. I happen to be taking probably the hardest school year I ever took – at least, that’s what older people said before it started, and which proved to be true now that two months of classes have gone by. Free time isn’t that abundant and I prefer to spend it doing actually something more useful than writing about random things on this blog. That almost explains why I haven’t been active on communities like FreeVPS. But there’s more…

Some time in mid-October I was left without a reliable, 24/7 Internet connection. This, after two or three months without an unlimited-traffic Internet connection, during which I had to hold the downloading of system updates for both Linux and Windows on all of my machines, plus the Android tablet; to keep to a minimum the access to online streaming media; and of course to hold any other big download/upload tasks. I had no Internet connection at home, which means checking the emails at school when possible. Checking anything other than email is horribly slow and unpractical on my old phone, and that’s why I repeat email is the fastest and most reliable way of communicating with me.

At the same time, I was being kept busy with school work. Free time was spent developing an Utilities software for my graphic calculator, a Casio fx-CG 20; this was probably the most useful thing I could do without an Internet connection, because at least gcc still hasn’t moved to the cloud.

Around 1st November, the technical problems that were stopping me from having Internet at home were solved (read: free wifi hotspot magically came back online!), and so the second cause for my lack of participation in the online life was solved. But there was still the first cause: school. So slowly, as I was having free time, I began to put me up to date on what happened while I was offline, and to make slow progress on my projects.

Apart from all this, I also have friends and family, and my real-life social life is way more active than it used to be one or two years ago (my brain must have installed some system updates, finally).

To conclude, on the IT side of things I’m now developing a JPEG image viewer for the Casio Prizm, using the picojpeg library (incredibly useful). The thing already works but is damn slow, plus selecting files is still a pain; this Prizm add-in isn’t yet published anywhere, or even announced on any place except this blog post (and don’t consider this an official announcement).

I’m also trying to keep participating on online communities such as FreeVPS and Cemetech, and to keep my Twitter feed rolling, but the first cause for my online absence is still valid, and will only stop being on the beginning of July next year. This doesn’t exactly mean I won’t be online, but that you shouldn’t expect me to be as active as I once used to be. Again, if you need something, email me (admin at tny dot im, or my username on Gmail).

The dedicated server where the VPS that hosts this blog was installed had a serious hard drive failure, and all the data in it was lost. As a result, I was prompted to reinstall my server. The “hydrogen” server was down from around the 2:00 UTC to around 17:00 UTC (11th September).

Fortunately, I had a backup of the blog contents from 8th September. Reinstalling WordPress and all the software required to run it (Nginx, PHP, MySQL) was still a big hassle, and looks like the PageLines settings aren’t saved in the backup WordPress generated, so I didn’t feel like setting up PageLines again and the blog is back to a white-ish theme (which I have already modified to include a widget area at the bottom…).

It also looks like restoring a backup results in subscribers being sent an email per each post restored… fortunately, the blog only has one subscriber at the moment so this wasn’t a major spamming event.

Oh, and I almost forgot: tnyCloud is gone, but that shouldn’t be a problem since nobody seemed to use it, not even me. Also, since I was forced to move to a smaller VPS, I no longer had enough disk space to host a service like tnyCloud, so basically this hard drive failure saved me the hassle of declaring it dead.

I hope the prolonged downtime didn’t annoy you much. The tny.im URL shortener is hosted on another server which was up all the time – UptimeRobot tells me it has a whooping 99.97% uptime ratio. Now that it already has the three nines, it’s time to work to get the five nines 😉

A server reload is nothing compared to what happened eleven years ago.

This time, I’m sure it will be up for at least one year – if it goes down within this period, at least it won’t be because of the domain, as that’s paid for an year already. I didn’t pay it, some friends at Cloudstg did – I’ll pay them back gradually, by advertising their services and such. Again, thanks for investing $11 on my service: if it weren’t you, I’d have to spend my savings on buying this short domain, which would leave me with no money to renew this .com domain next October.

The tny.im domain is as long as l.f.nu, but with less dots, nicer, and since it’s a top level domain and not a subdomain, I have much more control over it. This is a important point, as I plan on adding IPv6 support to tny.im, and a FreeDNS subdomain wouldn’t let me have multiple records on a subdomain. With a real TLD, I can have both an A and an AAAA record for the same domain.

Like it was with the transition from 4.l.to to l.f.nu, no data has been lost, and 4.l.to and l.f.nu links work as long as you change the domain to tny.im. Statistics, link editing, etc. all work.

I hope you enjoy tny.im, and remember, this time it’s for real: the shortener will be around for more than a year, assuming I can get enough profit from it to keep paying for the domain. Having me profiting with tny.im only depends on you – by using my shortening service, you’ll help me earn some cents from ads (but, please, don’t click-bomb them!), which I’ll use to renew the domain and eventually pay for server(s), in order to offer you an even better service.

Again, I hope the ads are not annoying… if they are, make sure to drop me a line so I can fix them.